From what I remember of VMS, the big NT/VMS parallel is the concept of "here's a big honkin' API call that does everything," which contrasts with the Unixy apporach of "build it out of a gazillion little functional blocks."
One typical use for VMS was for one-off in-house projects (like an inventory system or some such). The "rich" API's made development easier, but VMS got displaced by more-reliable unix in this area as Unix development tools got better.
The other major use I saw was as a development platform for code that would later be migrated to an embedded system. The avionics for military jets were developed this way, for example. Again, the "rich" API sped things along.
Note that both of those uses required good documentation. Hence, the Big Orange Wall: The better the documentation, the better VMS sold.
The "rich" Windows API, however, serves an entirely different purpose. It is there to defeat reverse-engineering attempts and impede writing portable code. The worse the documentation is, the better Windows sells. So no big Orange Wall for NT, and you can't use NT like you could VMS, even if it is architecurally similar internally.
Your description of emissions shifting to exempt treaties already has an example: Germany intends to meet its CO2 targets by importing electricity from Poland, so Kyoto has the effect of moving coal-powered plants 500 miles east. Oh, and tansmission losses require more coal to be burned. To act similarly, The US would have to import electricity from Mexico, a more difficult proposition because of the larger distances.
Attacking somone with multiple overrated mods? Boy, some people need to get a life (as I type on/. on a sunny Saturday afternoon). So we need meta-meta moderation, to catch lazy meta-moderators? Well, hitting the same person multiple times could be caught algorithmically, at least. And over-rating a funny mod shoudn't take off any kharma (maybe it doesn't already). It would be nice to personalize what moderators you trust, some button that had the effect of, whoever modded this up, set my account to ignore the effect of that moderator. And maybe, instead of getting 5 mod points, you get 4 up-mod points and 1 down-mod point separately.
Something has to be done though. It is impossible to participate in any political discussion anymore. Attack-moderation has taken the place of flaming.
If, after selecting your moderation, you use up or down arows to page the screen, it will instead change your moderation selection. I have almost done this a few times...
I had a sneaking suspicion that HP bought Compaq so that the price break they got on Pentium chips (due to technology cross-licensing) could be leveraged across more machines. It's a pretty sad statement on the PC business today when businesses completely reorganize just to get a better price on a component.
Is that necessarily bad? Columbus Ohio, for example, was a hotbed of buggy makers 100 years ago. Many of these buggy builders tried to switch over to auto body production but most failed. Better to just milk what's left of the business and get out rather than blow your wad trying launch an old organization into a new business in which you have little competitive edge.
I can't remember the names, but we still have real estate holding companies left over from the 19th-century railroad boom. Their transportation business is long gone, but they still sit around collecting rent and paying dividends, a mere shadow of thier former selves. But that's a better deal than what stockholders in the Pennsylvania Railroad got. PRR continued building and investing in their business, but, in the end, the stockholders were left holding worthless paper.
In fact, what HP is doing now is what Microsoft should be doing. They got pile of cash from Windows and Office, but can't invest it internally in anything that makes money at all, let alone perform better than Treasury Bonds. So MS, logically, should become an investment bank, buy stock on Wall Street, and thereby invest in businesses that actually make money.
All you folks can thank GE's Jack Welch for that practice. It is one of the managerial techniques he used and has since been widely imitated. In the hands of competent leadership, it can help keep an organization from geting bloated. But like so many management fads, it gets implemented clumsily and without regard to why it is supposed to work. I don't think Welch ever intended the "bottom 10%" rule to apply to technical staff, but more to management & sales. And it never had to mean laying off people; re-assigning to anoher job function can also be appropriate.
The problems (transitional and otherwise) with privatizing Social Security have been solved. Chile has a privatized national pension, designed by US experts. Most of what are cited as problems with privatizing SS are really already present in the current system: existing (& colossal) unfunded liabilities appear on properly accounted books and must be funded, or the balance sheet won't add up.
Not just CD's. Now that I have a convenient digital player (a Neuros in my case), I've digitized favorites from my moribund cassette tape collection. As a side benefit, I can burn a CD from my tapes an stick it in the 200 CD carousel changer.
I unboxed the old phonograph to convert my vinyl, but the old turntable died during those years in storage!
Better for these sorts of transactions is E-Gold, or one of the similar internet gold currencies.
Pro: Low fees (about 0.5 cents minimum), inflation-proof, more private than credit cards or checks, trivially easy to set up accounts, truly international.
Con: Hard to get gold in your account, and don't even dare use IE if you have a significant amount of gold in your account; transactions are irrevocable, so password-stealing worms can steal your gold!
Seriously, what else can you buy for the geeky type? We are already buried in the clutter of zillions of toys, and you can't exactly put,on you xmas list, Amiga 3.01 ROM chip (for A1200, not A4000), oh, the only place you can get it is www.blah.com item #blah. Well actually I did, but I had to buy it myself, give to my wife (who posed as having bought it herself) to give to my sister in law, to give back to me.
If the price of oil rises and electricity falls, then we will see a nibbling away at the edges of oil consumption.
Electrified railroads will replace diesel locomotives.
Cargo will move from diesel trucks to these railroads.
Buses and fleet cars will go to electric power.
Synthetic fuel plants will be built to convert coal or biomass to liquid fuels, and those plants will rely on electricity commensurate with the market price.
Home heating will shift toward heat pumps, freeing up natural gas to make methanol.
Plastic consumption will shift from petroleum-derived resins (polyethylene, ABS) toward coal-derived (nylon)
I can't remember the source, but the poll I saw was that most Alaskans want drilling in the ANWR. They get a dividend check every year from North Slope oil coming down the pipeline, and that oil is running out. The Supreme Court (which has original jurisdiction in this type of case) recently settled a dispute between Alaska & the Federal gov't over exactly where they are allowed to sell mineral rights.
I say if the Alaskans want it, what claim does some environmentalist dude in California or New York, thousnads of miles away, have to say they are not allowed?
The militarization of US oil policy is older than that. The Truman administration propped up the monarchy of Ibn Saud following WWII (whose desert armor battles pointed up the strategic importance of mid-east oil). We have been stuck to the tar-baby ever since.
Much like Alaska, which also has much oil and few people. The state income tax there is negative, called a "resource dividend" or some such. But that situation can't be duplicated for the larger populations of the lower 48 or mainland Europe.
Some around here scoff at me for this, but given the difficulties hydrogen storage and transport, at some point it becomes more practical to electrify the highway system. Short range city traffic would run on battery power, and long distance highways would have a catenary.
It is a technology that, unlike hydrogen, is actually proven to work on an industrial scale (on railroads), and can be built out incrementally (starting with cargo trucks on major interstates, and woking out from there).
Even simpler than that is to make methanol from the methane. Most cars today can accept a certain amount of methanol mixed with gasoline. Gradually increase the percentage of methanol over 20 years until the gasoline is gone. The switchover will be barely noticable to anyone but antique car afficianados.
Individually-wrapped cheese is a small sign of the unified US economy. The milk probably came from the upper midwest, was processed in a huge plant in Illinois or St. Louis, and then packaged for markets all across the USA. The idea of setting up "fair trade" agreements to balance out cheap imported Wisconsin diary products with cheap exported Texan beef never occurs to anyone (but we have spats of this sort with Europe all the time). By contrast, the unified European market is relatively new, and hampered by language barriers, so cheese production isn't quite so specialized yet.
I don't think it is really necessary to build new plants. Existing plants can be scaled up to deliver more power; they all have to be near a large body of water to act as a heatsink so there really aren't that many new places you could build anyway.
Of course that just shifts the problem from NIMBY nukes to NIMBY power lines, and NIMBY hydropower storage lakes (that pump up at night and release for peaking demand).
I always found the area near 3 Mile Island (Eisenhower Rd and such) rather pretty, in a quaint sort of way. You get closer and it starts getting that dumpy riverside look, but a few neighborhoods do seem to be sprucing up. That's the east side of the Susquehanna, can't speak about the west side.
Which midwestern state is it--Iowa?--that uses a computer algorithm to draw congressional districts? A technical solution to gerrymandering, an idea whose time has come!
There sure is a lot of honor among those electors; their faithfulness is better than 99.5%, and never did an unexpected electoral vote change the outcome. The last unfaithful elector cast a vote for Reagan in 1976, instead of Ford. So Reagan broke two electoral records: the most electoral votes (1984) and the Republican with most electoral votes without being the candidiate (1976).
Slashdot Mirror
One typical use for VMS was for one-off in-house projects (like an inventory system or some such). The "rich" API's made development easier, but VMS got displaced by more-reliable unix in this area as Unix development tools got better.
The other major use I saw was as a development platform for code that would later be migrated to an embedded system. The avionics for military jets were developed this way, for example. Again, the "rich" API sped things along.
Note that both of those uses required good documentation. Hence, the Big Orange Wall: The better the documentation, the better VMS sold.
The "rich" Windows API, however, serves an entirely different purpose. It is there to defeat reverse-engineering attempts and impede writing portable code. The worse the documentation is, the better Windows sells. So no big Orange Wall for NT, and you can't use NT like you could VMS, even if it is architecurally similar internally.
Your description of emissions shifting to exempt treaties already has an example: Germany intends to meet its CO2 targets by importing electricity from Poland, so Kyoto has the effect of moving coal-powered plants 500 miles east. Oh, and tansmission losses require more coal to be burned. To act similarly, The US would have to import electricity from Mexico, a more difficult proposition because of the larger distances.
Something has to be done though. It is impossible to participate in any political discussion anymore. Attack-moderation has taken the place of flaming.
If, after selecting your moderation, you use up or down arows to page the screen, it will instead change your moderation selection. I have almost done this a few times...
I had a sneaking suspicion that HP bought Compaq so that the price break they got on Pentium chips (due to technology cross-licensing) could be leveraged across more machines. It's a pretty sad statement on the PC business today when businesses completely reorganize just to get a better price on a component.
I can't remember the names, but we still have real estate holding companies left over from the 19th-century railroad boom. Their transportation business is long gone, but they still sit around collecting rent and paying dividends, a mere shadow of thier former selves. But that's a better deal than what stockholders in the Pennsylvania Railroad got. PRR continued building and investing in their business, but, in the end, the stockholders were left holding worthless paper.
In fact, what HP is doing now is what Microsoft should be doing. They got pile of cash from Windows and Office, but can't invest it internally in anything that makes money at all, let alone perform better than Treasury Bonds. So MS, logically, should become an investment bank, buy stock on Wall Street, and thereby invest in businesses that actually make money.
All you folks can thank GE's Jack Welch for that practice. It is one of the managerial techniques he used and has since been widely imitated. In the hands of competent leadership, it can help keep an organization from geting bloated. But like so many management fads, it gets implemented clumsily and without regard to why it is supposed to work. I don't think Welch ever intended the "bottom 10%" rule to apply to technical staff, but more to management & sales. And it never had to mean laying off people; re-assigning to anoher job function can also be appropriate.
The problems (transitional and otherwise) with privatizing Social Security have been solved. Chile has a privatized national pension, designed by US experts. Most of what are cited as problems with privatizing SS are really already present in the current system: existing (& colossal) unfunded liabilities appear on properly accounted books and must be funded, or the balance sheet won't add up.
I unboxed the old phonograph to convert my vinyl, but the old turntable died during those years in storage!
Better for these sorts of transactions is E-Gold, or one of the similar internet gold currencies.
Pro: Low fees (about 0.5 cents minimum), inflation-proof, more private than credit cards or checks, trivially easy to set up accounts, truly international.
Con: Hard to get gold in your account, and don't even dare use IE if you have a significant amount of gold in your account; transactions are irrevocable, so password-stealing worms can steal your gold!
You can imagine my feigned surprise...
I say if the Alaskans want it, what claim does some environmentalist dude in California or New York, thousnads of miles away, have to say they are not allowed?
The militarization of US oil policy is older than that. The Truman administration propped up the monarchy of Ibn Saud following WWII (whose desert armor battles pointed up the strategic importance of mid-east oil). We have been stuck to the tar-baby ever since.
Much like Alaska, which also has much oil and few people. The state income tax there is negative, called a "resource dividend" or some such. But that situation can't be duplicated for the larger populations of the lower 48 or mainland Europe.
oldaddress9475@aol.com is now newaddress@redirectservice.com
Anyone who googles for his old address will jump right to it. Just make sure the new service has spam filtering!
It is a technology that, unlike hydrogen, is actually proven to work on an industrial scale (on railroads), and can be built out incrementally (starting with cargo trucks on major interstates, and woking out from there).
Even simpler than that is to make methanol from the methane. Most cars today can accept a certain amount of methanol mixed with gasoline. Gradually increase the percentage of methanol over 20 years until the gasoline is gone. The switchover will be barely noticable to anyone but antique car afficianados.
Apparently no one rembers it but you & me. On Sept 30th, 1999, I looked around for anything to mark the occasion. Coudn't find anything.
Individually-wrapped cheese is a small sign of the unified US economy. The milk probably came from the upper midwest, was processed in a huge plant in Illinois or St. Louis, and then packaged for markets all across the USA. The idea of setting up "fair trade" agreements to balance out cheap imported Wisconsin diary products with cheap exported Texan beef never occurs to anyone (but we have spats of this sort with Europe all the time). By contrast, the unified European market is relatively new, and hampered by language barriers, so cheese production isn't quite so specialized yet.
Of course that just shifts the problem from NIMBY nukes to NIMBY power lines, and NIMBY hydropower storage lakes (that pump up at night and release for peaking demand).
I always found the area near 3 Mile Island (Eisenhower Rd and such) rather pretty, in a quaint sort of way. You get closer and it starts getting that dumpy riverside look, but a few neighborhoods do seem to be sprucing up. That's the east side of the Susquehanna, can't speak about the west side.
Oh Canada! We break away from you.
We say it out loud.
But you still don't know it.
Because it isn't in English...
Which midwestern state is it--Iowa?--that uses a computer algorithm to draw congressional districts? A technical solution to gerrymandering, an idea whose time has come!
There sure is a lot of honor among those electors; their faithfulness is better than 99.5%, and never did an unexpected electoral vote change the outcome. The last unfaithful elector cast a vote for Reagan in 1976, instead of Ford. So Reagan broke two electoral records: the most electoral votes (1984) and the Republican with most electoral votes without being the candidiate (1976).